PRESS RELEASE
September 3, 2014
The Bedford County Sheriff’s Office would like to alert the citizens about a possible email phishing scam that citizens have reported receiving.
The email claims it is from the US Department of Treasury stating that Jacob “Jack” Lew, Secretary of Treasury, will release $500,000 to your bank account and all you have to do is provide $150 and your bank account information.
Any email from any government agency (federal, state, or local) will require you to come in person or verify your identity before discussing any sensitive information with you. There is not a single government agency that will ever request bank account or sensitive information via email or request payment over email. Don’t be scammed!
If you look carefully at the sample email below you will see that the “From”, “Reply-to”, and “To” information lists the email accounts as coming from gmail.com or qq.com. QQ.com is a foreign domain. This information is known as the ‘header’ information. You can use this information to determine if the message you receive is legitimate or not.
Also note in the sample at the bottom the request to respond to ‘infotreasury@terra.com’. Terra.com is also a foreign based website.
If you receive this email please contact the US Department of Treasury directly to report it. The US Treasury does not send unsolicited requests and does not seek personal or financial information from members of the public by email.
If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from or involving the Internal Revenue Service (IRS):
report it to phishing@irs.gov according to these instructions.
If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, report it to the Treasury Office of Inspector General Hotline by:
online form
Email: hotline@oig.treas.gov
Call 1-800-359-3898 (toll free)
Above information from http://www.treasury.gov/services/report-fwa/Pages/Report-Email-Scams.aspx
